Researcher
Jon Harald Sande Lie
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Summary
Jon Harald Sande Lie holds a PhD in social anthropology from the University of Bergen (2011), Research Professor and Head of the Research group on peace, conflict and development.
His research scope pertains to international aid, global governance and state formation, focusing on development and humanitarian aid in Eastern Africa, particularly Ethiopia and Uganda where he has conducted long-term fieldworks in studying the partnership relation at the level of NGOs and those involving the World Bank.
He is co-editor for the journal Forum for Development Studies. He is project manager for the FRIPRO project Developmentality and the anthropology of partnership, and he is project manager and principal investigator of Public–Private Development Interfaces in Ethiopia - Research project | NUPI
Expertise
Education
2011 PhD in Social Anthropology, University of Bergen
2004 MPhil in Social Anthropology, University of Oslo
2000 Cand. Mag. (roughly equivalent to BA): Social Anthropology (1,5 year); History of Ideas (1 year); History of Religion (1 year); Philosophy (0,5 year); Development and Environment (0,5 year)
Work Experience
2022- Research professor, NUPI
2007- Research fellow/Senior Research Fellow, NUPI
2004- Scholarship holder, Institute of Social Anthropology, University of Bergen
Aktivitet
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Clear all filtersConclusion: Public–private relations in the wild
In this conclusion, the authors draw on their readings of all the contributions in 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development: Insights from Ethiopia' to highlight the contributors’ insights and the connections between them, as well as suggest new directions and questions that have been opened up by the volume’s collective analysis. The chapters in this volume illuminate how the PPP agenda is rendered in markedly different ways as it moves from policy to practice despite sustained efforts to refine PPP frameworks and claims about their importance for achieving the UN SDGs and reducing the international development finance gap. By tracing partnership relations over time and across borders within and beyond Ethiopia, the contributors to this volume shed light on messy constellations of actors, institutions and relations that fit – although often uneasily – under the PPP umbrella. They follow public and private configurations, from beer breweries to textile exporters to housing and hospitals, in international development cooperation and around the windowless conference rooms of the World Bank. In this conclusion, the authors suggest that the unruliness, inconsistencies and arbitrariness that emerge through these cases indicate that PPPs can be fruitfully reframed not only as wild but also as situated in the wild. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
From synergy to subsidy – The cultural problem of public–private partnerships in international development
This chapter explores the cultural problem of PPPs. The PPP policy agenda in international development seeks to juxtapose actors with distinct rationales and institutional logics, with the ambition to create synergy between them. In practice, however, the intentional encounter between public and private actors produces interface situations that also amplify the actors’ distinctiveness and thus the cultural problem of PPPs. The chapter draws on data collection in the World Bank and a case study in Ethiopia of a PPP development project involving an NGO and a multinational corporation. This shows the practical renderings and effects of the culture problem, here causing the private actor to withdraw from the partnership and their joint project. Thus, what was meant as a project of synergy becomes a publicly funded proxy and subsidy of private interests. At the general level, the chapter shows how the PPP agenda compels categorisation as either public or private while at the same time it seeks to merge these differences. As such, the interface dynamics and cultural problem are not only produced by the PPP agenda but may also undermine it. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
Unravelling the Ps in public–private partnerships for development
With the launch of UN Agenda 2030, public–private partnerships (PPPs) became formalised as both an objective of and a means of implementing the UN Sustainable Development Goals. An established policy-oriented research agenda has long sought to make sense of the ‘jungle’ of PPPs by identifying critical success factors and chronic shortcomings. Yet the instrumentalist inclination to evaluate PPPs restricts this agenda’s theoretical horizons. Building on a relatively smaller but significant body of critical PPP work, Agenda 2030 calls for research that embraces the messiness of PPPs and treats the plasticity of the term as a feature to understand rather than a bug to be overcome. To wit, Agenda 2030 advances an inductive approach to exploring the PPP buzzword in its specific enactments and makes the case for problematising the Ps in PPP from the bottom up and from multiple perspectives. Ultimately, Agenda 2030 highlights the theoretical value of escaping the evaluation meta-narrative that delimits the theoretical potential of a great deal of existing research on PPPs for development and PPPs more broadly. In addition to helping inform and enhance our understanding of the contemporary PPP agenda, this approach is useful for making sense of the political and capitalist forces that are shaping not only Ethiopia but the world at large today. This chapter is part of the book 'The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development'.
The Politics of Public–Private Partnerships and International Development – Insights from Ethiopia
With the launch of Agenda 2030, public–private partnerships (PPPs) were heralded as an important means of realising the UN Sustainable Development Goals and providing more sustainable development financing in the global south. This book explores PPPs from the bottom up, drawing on extensive empirical research in Ethiopia to illuminate the diversity of practices, arrangements and contradictions that the PPP agenda enables, generates and occludes. Despite the omnipresence of PPP talk among governments and international organisations, donor and recipient agencies, and private actors, there exists no universally agreed definition of PPPs, and in practice they encompass a remarkable diversity of activities and arrangements. This book thoroughly examines PPPs in Ethiopia, considering what actors they bring together, what power dynamics they produce, how the dynamics alter them, what PPPs and such dynamics say about changing state–society relations and how the individual Ps of PPPs get infused with context-specific meaning. By investigating how PPPs play out in practice, the book sheds new light on how this ambiguous but proliferating discourse is changing the meanings, processes and mechanisms of international development. This book illuminates the unseen consequences of translating bold sustainable development goals into practice and will be of interest to researchers and practitioners of international development.
End review, NORDEM programme 2021-2025
Norway's Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MFA) commissioned this review of the NORDEM programme 2021–2024, managed by NORCAP/NRC. The programme supports democracy, human rights, and peacebuilding through expert secondments to international organizations. While the original budget was NOK 455.3 million, actual expenditures with addenda ended up being NOK 483.7 million with the number of assignment-months increasing from 697 in 2021 to 812 in 2024, primarily to OSCE, UN agencies, and EU bodies.
Humanitarian–development nexus
This is a chapter in the book Elgar Encyclopedia of Development.
Localization and developmentality: Policy pragmatism in pandemic times
Motivation: Localization is increasingly invoked in debates about how to reform international aid: to improve aid effectiveness and address ethical concerns by turning hierarchical aid relations on their head. This has proved to be easier said than done. The COVID-19 pandemic produced logistical impediments to aid practitioners, which translated into a renewed, if temporary, interest in localization. Purpose: The initial scope of the research engaged with the notion of partnership during COVID-19, but almost all informants drew attention to the concept of localization. The article maps and analyses the challenges and advantages of localization, as seen from the practitioners' perspective. Approach and methods: The article draws on 24 interviews conducted in Oslo with representatives of various Norwegian development and humanitarian non-governmental organizations and government agencies, in addition to policy and grey literature review. Findings: The article shows that the re-emergence of the localization debate during COVID-19 occurred not because of any ambition to reform aid, but as a pragmatic and temporary response to the logistical impediments caused by the pandemic. Reflections from the interviewees on the pros and cons offer more substantial insights into why localization fails to change practice, while at the same time localization enables a form of indirect governance related to accountability regimes. This is analysed as developmentality, reflecting the logic that localization takes place when recipients do as donors want, but they do so voluntarily, which suggests that localization counterintuitively may reinforce existing power structures. Policy implications: Localization is poorly conceptualized. While a definition could be helpful in practice, one that is too rigid could undermine the diversity of actors and knowledge that localization aims to advance. At the operational level, localization requires greater flexibility and slack throughout the aid chain, especially in the audit and accountability regimes of donor and funding authorities, which permeate and uphold lopsided aid relations.
Bottom-up development as framed freedom: developmentality and donor power
International development assistance is founded on and reproduces a set of conceptual and structural binaries. Development actors themselves have attempted to alter lopsided aid relations, as illustrated by the prominent policy agendas of ownership and localisation in the 2010s. These are both expressions of bottom-up approaches to international aid, which challenge the very hierarchical nature of development as a particular Western instrument and historical project of intervention. This article argues that the top-heavy, donor-driven policies to turn development bottom-up fail not simply because of these discursive challenges. Aid asymmetries also persist because of the neoliberal audit culture evolving in tandem with the liberal contours of ownership and localisation agendas. This is analysed in terms of developmentality, which, as a tacit and indirect form of power, is both produced by and simultaneously undermines the liberal tenets of bottom-up approaches.